Never before have Cantabria, La Rioja, Castilla y León, Aragón and the Valencian Community been so united.
Five autonomous communities, which, in addition to the political color - all are governed by the PP, in the case of Aragón and the Valencian Community with the support of Vox -, are united, as they claim, by a crucial issue: the absence of agile and modern train communications, typical of the 21st century, for the transport of passengers and goods.
Precisely, the need to promote the high-performance Cantabrian-Mediterranean corridor, a project to unite the Cantabrian and Levantine coasts, the seaports of Santander and Valencia (capitals separated by more than 700 km by road), in just four hours, is the reason that has united in La Rioja - the only peninsular region without a highway connection with Madrid - these five communities, convened by their respective business organizations, to demand a “firm commitment” so that this communication infrastructure becomes a reality in “ a real and concrete date, 2030″.
In this way, the president of the Federation of Companies of La Rioja (FER), Jaime García Calzada, has made clear the demand shared by the employers' associations of Cantabria, Castilla y León, Aragón and the Valencian Community, which is reflected in the declaration for the promotion of the high-performance railway corridor, both for goods and passengers, which all parties have signed in an event, in Logroño, which was attended by two regional presidents - Gonzalo Capellán, La Rioja, and Jorge Azcón, Aragon-, as well as representatives from the rest of the territories.
This infrastructure is “a path for the future,” García-Calaza stressed, “which not only represents a high-performance path, but is much more, a path of opportunities for companies and people” in these five regions, which They represent about 19.3% of the Spanish GDP and 20% of the population in Spain, with almost 10 million inhabitants, according to data from the National Institute of Statistics (INE) corresponding to 2022 and 2023.
Its weight is even greater, above 25% in both cases, if it is expanded with two other autonomous communities, the Basque Country and Navarra, as stated in the planning of the EU TEN-T network, where this corridor It connects the two main railway axes in the Iberian Peninsula, the Mediterranean and Atlantic corridors.
The business demand for the promotion of this infrastructure is based on the possibilities opened by the connection of six seaports (Valencia, Sagunto, Castellón, Bilbao, Pasajes and Santander) in order to strengthen exports and presence in international markets.
“Valencia is the first port in Spain [in container traffic] and the third in Europe,” said the president of the Port Authority of Valencia, Mar Chao.
“Rail freight transport, with the large highways planned, is the way to decongest the two border points, in the Basque Country and Catalonia, and avoid the passage of 22,000 trucks,” according to the dean of the Official College of Industrial Engineers of Aragón and La Rioja and president of the European Alliance for the development of Railway Corridors, Salvador Galve.
The United States is one of the main references in rail freight transport, where “50% of them go by train”, as confirmed by Iñaki Barrón, president of the technical committee of the latter entity and author of the report 'State of the railway sector Spanish'.
The train, the majority option
Added to this is another powerful economy, Japan, where the train is the majority option for travelers to travel.
“Each inhabitant travels by train at least eight times a year, a fast and economical way to cover long distances and with almost exact reliability in timing, the average delay is six seconds,” Barrón pointed out.
The business demands have had the support of the different ones.
“It is unacceptable that Valencia and Zaragoza are not connected by a high-performance line to the Cantabrian coast,” stressed the Aragonese president, Jorge Azcón.
“The Cantabrian-Mediterranean corridor must be the backbone of the northeast of the Iberian Peninsula,” he added.
An idea that his Rioja counterpart, Gonzalo Capellán, has delved into.
“We are risking the future of the territory, the future of the economy, the future of companies, our future.
Once the basic axes are already defined and little can be modified, we are staking our future on the connection between two poles, the Cantabrian and the Mediterranean, keys for the movement of goods and people.
La Rioja cannot be left out of this great commercial axis,” he added.